Spectrum Blog - In spanish!
For those who speak or understand spanish, I started a blog about the speccy. It's mostly based on reviews, but I plan to write other stuff for the ZX. So far I have been doing a compilation of all articles I wrote for magazines, but there will be soon brand new articles.
http://rincondelspectrum.blogspot.com/
http://rincondelspectrum.blogspot.com/
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Actually, it's been great to discover the Spanish retro scene. Anyone at WOS who's learning Spanish can find a lot of interesting things to read (and write about) in that language - and if there are interesting things to read, it makes it much easier to learn.
does that mean you great news? and something about practicing spanish?
just a guess
I regret never studying a foreign language at school (apart from french which was compulsory and I still couldn't be arsed), from what I can assertain it's quite a thriving scene especially when it comes to hardware mods which alway peeks my interest even.
@Binman, yes buenas noticias, and something about practising spanish, you got it right ;)
Actually, the spanish scene is quite active, but it also has its problems and it's quite divided in groups.
Cheers!
OK, time to drift a bit off topic :-)
Whenever I do something, I tend to be a bit obsessive about it. Which is odd, because at school I was anything *but* obsessive about learning about anything (except computers, of course). I actually started learning Spanish so I didn't feel like an imperialist when on holiday in Mallorca. I wanted to at least get food, drink, and be able to check into a hotel without having to speak English. And it all started there. Before I even got to Mallorca, the purpose of the holiday had changed from being just a holiday but to hear Spanish people speak too. (Even though there's a local dialect of Catalan there, everyone seems to speak Spanish).
Now I wanted to dispel two myths:
Myth 1: British people are bad at languages.
Myth 2: You have to be a child to learn a language.
Myth 1 is caused just because most language teaching in our schools is *dreadful*. It's boring. It doesn't need to be boring, but it is. So kids aren't minded to learn. It's also graded unrealistically. A while ago, some GCSE French students were on the Radio 4 PM programme, on an item about foreign language teaching. There were "A" grade students who couldn't even describe what they had done this morning in French when put on the spot by the interviewer. It's incredible - but after 3 months of doing Spanish on my own devices, I had learned more of that language than I ever had of French - and I was forced to do French at school for 7 long years! I've got nothing against French or the language (not that I can speak a word of it!) just the appalling language teaching methods. The kids that do go on to be fluent in school-taught languages, in the main, do it in *spite* of the school's language lessons not *because* of them.
Also, you're never taught to think in the target language. All the French lessons at school were all about thinking in English and translating. Absolutely no emphasis - it wasn't even mentioned - was given on how important it is to try and think in French rather than in English. OK, so you do have to use your native language as a crutch sometimes, but it's just that, a crutch to get you going.
Myth 2: I started learning Spanish in May/June 2008. Not much more than a year ago. By July this year, I was giving a demonstration on the Spectranet at RetroEuskal in that language. OK, so my grammar wasn't perfect, and Albert Valls helped me understand any of the questions I couldn't, and I had to write out first what I wanted to say so I could say it with any kind of fluidity, and I'm certain I have a dreadful accent, but people actually understood me. I am certain I can speak a LOT more Spanish than a Spanish baby born in Spain in May 2008 :-) So yes, you CAN learn as an adult and learn well. Perhaps you'll never have an accent that sounds native - but it's my goal to be near-fluent within 3 years of starting (so by May/June 2011). At the moment, it's still difficult though. I have a lot of trouble understanding what people from Madrid are saying (I found it much easier to understand the people of Bilbao, just the opposite of what I had expected). Although there was one guy at RetroEuskal (I'm not sure where he was from) - I couldn't understand a single word he said. (And later one of the other guys there told me - don't feel bad about it, we can't understand him either. Perhaps I had encountered the Spanish equivalent of a Glaswegian...)
But even two months on since then, my listening comprehension has improved a lot. I watch an hour TV programmes on TVE (rtve.es) every day - who are good enough to put all the tv programmes they make on their website without restricting them to Spain only. In early July this year (IIRC), I started watching drama programmes because they have more colloquial phrases and less formal speech because I had got to the point where I could understand the news and documentaries - no, not every word, but I understood it well enough. (My favorite programme is Redes - a science/philosophy/technology oriented programme, where Eduard Punset interviews people on a variety of subjects. The really good thing is that not only does it treat subjects that I find interesting, but Eduard Punset speaks really slowly and clearly :-) ). I have also become strangely addicted to a quiz show called "Saber y Ganar".
So I watched this programme called "Unidad Central Operativo", a police/crime drama. For the entire 80 minute programme, I understood exactly *one* sentence! The rest was gibberish.
But now, just a couple of months later, I'm understanding much more - at least 1/3rd of the programme is understandable. Actually, drama programmes are quite good because there are lots of other cues to associate the words you're hearing with what's going on. The people are showing emotion, and there are events happening.
Well, I've probably gone on for far too long :-) To answer your original question, I could read BBC Mundo (BBC World Service in Spanish) news articles on bbcmundo.com and broadly understand them after about 4 months of learning. Reading isn't too bad because you can do it slowly, and the news is written in very formal language. To gain a reasonable understanding of what people were writing on speccy.org took me another 4 months or so. Listening I still find *much* harder, and speaking harder still (the problem with speaking is that I can't think as fast as my voice wants to go. Curiously, what I found in Bilbao is I could be talking about something, and then suddenly find a vocabulary hole and I came to a crashing halt, I couldn't even think of the word in English. It was very bizarre!) Now, after a couple of months more practise, I can now understand about a third of what's happening in "Los Misterios de Laura" or "Unidad Central Operativo" on TVE. I have to remind myself every time I'm finding it really hard that 18 months ago I couldn't even read the most basic thing in Spanish, and now I'm sitting down to watch what millions of native speakers watch on TV.
The good thing about the situation with language learning today is that it is *far* more accessable because of the Internet.
I started with a really good beginner's course called "Mi Vida Loca", by the BBC (this alone was worth last year's license fee) - http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/mividaloca/ - the important thing that this course taught me was learning a language can be *fun* and this is why I continued past the "ordering food/drinks/hotel" stage of the language.
I've used all sorts of things since - WordReference as a dictionary, just reading things like "El Pa?s" and bbcmundo.com (listening to the bbcmundo podcast too, and watching the videos), I also subscribed to Rosetta Stone for a while which is very good for picking up lots of vocabulary, I found it very effective albeit expensive. Also grammar websites, which really helped me understand why things were said how they are said - http://www.studyspanish.com/ and http://www.webworkbooks.com/spanish/grammar/ (these really helped me understand what the subjunctive is - we hardly use the subjunctive in English and so it's a very strange creature to English speakers). The other great thing about the Internet is it makes it easy to actually talk with native speakers - and using the language really helps the most.
The other thing to recognise is, whenever you're learning something, you'll plateau from time to time and even occasionally slide back. I've done enough learning of other subjects to know all about this, so I don't let it discourage me - I just keep with the program.
http://rincondelspectrum.blogspot.de/
Although the first entry will be the first games, so you better start reading older entries to follow the list in appropriate order :)
OooH :D
Sehr gut, Ich lerne aber es ist nicht einfach :)
Meine englisch ist zu besser :)